Henry James

As a novelist, Henry James departed from the Victorian traditionbin emphasizing too much upon the construction on the plot. He was essentially an impressionist and psychologist who did not care too much for the coherent of the plots of his novels. In that way, Henry James formed a modernistic approach in repudiating the excessive importance given by the victorian novelist to the technique of plot construction.

As a novelist, Henry James is also, as Conrad pointed out, 'a historian of fine conscience'. His novels aptly display his awareness of the nice discrimination of shades of conduct- ' the deep shadows and the sunny places of the human mind'. His novels display a cultivated fineness of manner, test and spiritual experiences, as when Madam Marie in The Portrait of a Lady, looks at a tea-cup and wonders whether she had been wasting her life in living a life of sophisticated uselessness.

Henry James is an intellectual novelist and not an emotional or passionate one. He is concerned more with the study of mental process than with the emotions of human heart. The Portrait of a Lady is intellectually poysed upon Henry James realisation that freedom is an abstract quality inherent in the individual soul.

As an artist Henry James incessantly experimented varied techniques. He was the first to adopt the 'stream of consciousness' technique, which was later adopted by James Joyce and Virginia Woolf. Henry James also evolved a new technique- he presented his story through the conscious of a single character discarding the ubiquity and omniscence of the traditional novelist.

All the above qualities make him a novelist's novelist and one of the supreme story teller and technicians in English fiction. He wrote a number of novels-
The American, Daisy Miller, The Portrait of a Lady, The Tragic Muse, The Wings of the Dove, The Golden Bowl, e.t.c.